Katya Urban
Epitaph
Memoriam for Lady
Desert Hands
Emotion House
Grief Coccoon
make urself at home
prostration to feel ... creation
how to have a conversation
Selected Photography
Selected Drawings
Selected Video Work
Live Painting
About
Mourning Doves
Winter 2025 ~ Ongoing
katya / lilah collaboration
Ongoing project memorializing poets whose lives were intertwined with collective death. With these birds, we hope to create a space of reverence to slow down and gaze up at the artists' words that adorn their wings. Suspended above books with places for people to sit and read, we envision a space to read, and reflect on the cycles of violence that continue today ~ What might we learn, what might we remember?
Mourning Dove 1: Zuzanna
Zuzanna Ginczanka is a Jewish, Polish poet who was writing poetry during the escalation and occupation of Nazi Germany. Originally raised in Rivne, Ukraine, she went on to live in and hide in various cities around Poland. She was ultimately killed at 27 years-old in Plaszow, outside of Krakow, right before the end of the war in 1944.
Her legacy lives on with an abundance of recovered poetry, including the one anthology she published in her lifetime, On Centaurs. Her poetry weaves topics of memory, womanhood, sensuality, state violence, grief, and Jewish identity.
Zuzanna Ginzcanka Plack, Krakow, Poland 2025